Twitter is finally making a feature update that people actually want. This is reported by a social media analyst Matt NavarraTwitter’s advanced search filters for mobile are coming soon.
This is how they look in practice:
The feature makes it easier to find specific tweets you’re looking for by filtering based on date, user, number of retweets, hashtags, and more. Sure, this has technically been around on Twitter for a long time, but figuring out how to access advanced search is pretty unintuitive and clunky. On the web, you need to type your search term and then click the three-dot menu to the right of the search bar to open advanced search. On mobile, this wasn’t even an option until now, when this feature release seems imminent.
These changes may have come from George Hotz, the security hacker known for developing iOS jailbreaks and reverse engineering the PlayStation 3. He later founded Comma.ai, a driver assistance startup that aims to develop Tesla Autopilot- like functionality to other cars.
But in his most recent role, Hotz was a Twitter intern. Yes, an intern. Hotz tweeted his support for a controversial memo in which Elon Musk told employees to get “extremely hardcore” or leave. When his followers came back to this, he said: ‘I will keep my money in my mouth. I am looking for a 12 week internship with Twitter for living costs in SF.
So Musk put his enemy to work – according to Hotz’s own tweets, Musk told him his job was to fix Twitter’s poor search system. In late November, he polled his followers to see what they wanted from Twitter searches. Some common answers included search within “liked” and “seen” tweets, more accessible advanced search, and moving away from exact text search.
Even Musk himself complained about Twitter’s search function within a week of acquiring the company. “Resolving searches is a high priority,” he says tweeted.
It’s not clear when this feature will roll out, but usually, when a feature can be recreated by an app researcher – as is the case here – it’s almost ready for the public eye.
We’ll have to wait and see how good this feature is in practice, but really, the only way Twitter’s search works is up.
